Do You Give Out a Study Guide?

Hmm. The textbook simplifies a vast amount of material, then I
simplify it more in lecture. Then you want me to extract the most
important ten per cent of that and put it on a study guide,
so if you know most of it you can get an A.

So what you're saying is the cutoff grade for an A should be 10%,
right?

I remember a few years ago talking to a friend of mine about the decline
of the Computer Science
and Engineering Department at FAU and I
was told, point blank (since this friend worked in the department) that the
department intentionally dumbed down the courses because too many
students were complaining about the difficulty of the course, and the
non-industry slant (I think they were teaching C at the time when C++ and
Java were hot) of the courses (my response was, “What? They expect a
university to be a trade school?”).

I'm still waiting for the day when people remember that an education is a
priviledge and not a right.

So what's with all this web based office productivity software? Or even
sites like Flickr? I
see this as the confluence of three things happening at once.

First off, in most cases, it's cheaper to ship a program via
wire than it is via a disk. A producer does not need to invest in a ton of
phyical material and the equipment to copy the bits to said physical
material, nor does it need to invest in boxes, paper, postage and shipping.
Of two programs sold at the same price, one only through a website, and one
only through a retail chain, the company selling the program via the website
will experience a higher profit margin than the company selling via the
retain chain (in fact, about the only time shipping bits via a disk is
cheaper is when the program being sold is of sufficient size that it would
take longer to ship it via wire than by FedEx).

Second off, a producer of commerical software is under attack from three
different fronts. First are the software pirates, that sell illegal copies
of software at dirt cheap prices (why not? They didn't have to spend any
money developing it, and copying bits are cheap cheap cheap). The more
popular the software is, the more likely it'll be pirated. Software
producers do have some recourse in organizations like the BSA, which, on the behalf of software companies, can
levy hefty fines on corporations (and to a lesser degree, individuals) that
haven't properly licensed the software they use, but in emerging markets
like China, there isn't much a US
or even Europoean software company can do.

The second front is the relunctance of customers to actually order and
install upgrades. It's not like there's a vast difference between Microsoft
Word 97 and Microsoft Word 2000 (much less Microsoft Word 2003) to warrent
the price of an upgrade. Especially when upgrades can be disruptive (not
always, but there are times when it
is). Let's face it, the largest competeter to Microsoft is Microsoft of
three years ago.

The third front is open source. There are more and more free (as in
beer) alternatives to the major software packages and they are improving.
And while they might not be able to compete at a high professional level (the GIMP vs. Photoshop? No contest:
Photoshop. On price? The GIMP) but for most people, the free alternatives
are Good Enough™.

And the third confluence relates to open source. There are several open
source licenses out there, and one, the GNU General Public License,
will tend to drive the actual purchase price of software towards zero.
Also, companies that release programs licended under the GNUGPL are required to make the source code available at
nominal charge, to those that have bought and used said program (heck, even
if you just use one library licended under the GNUGPL
you have to make the rest of your source code available in most cases). So
it's a bit more difficult to make money using open source.

Google (along with other companies like Yahoo, who own Flickr and Six Apart, who own VOX) have found a way around these problems.
There's no software to actually ship, since it all runs on computers owned
and operated by the respective companies and all are accessed via the web.
Second, there's no issues of customers not upgrading because the customers
don't install the software to begin with. They can leverage the vast amount
of code available as open source and by being careful to avoid any GNUGPL libraries, they can avoid having to give out the
source code. Revenue can come via advertising, or by offering access to
more functionality (much like LiveJournal).

As a scientist, Albert Einstein made great contributions in
physics that have enriched our view of the universe. Many of his
theories and postulates were received through his clairvoyance and
thus advanced our scientific world to the threshold of a
fourth-dimensional or an interdimensional physics. The concept of
mass being nonexistent and an illusion, and that, in reality, an
expression of pure energy; and the concept that the velocity of
light was not a static, constant expression of energy but was
relative to the plane of expression upon which the viewer
exists are two examples that will be understood as precursors in our
twenty-first century science.

Man, I just can't get enough of the crankpots on the Internet. The stuff they
write makes for some highly entertaining reading (that is, if you can understand it).

For the record, Einstein's Theory of Relativity (both Special and
General) state that the only thing constant in the Universe is the
speed of light (at 186,282.39mph)
and far from being received by clairvoyance it's the culmination of
Newtonian physics and finishes the work started by Hendrik Lorentz.

I awoke to a phone call from a frantic Smirk, trying to get one of our new servers under control from a deluge of email (if I sounded angry today Smirk, that's because I got up a bit early, and it took nearly two hours for me to eay my way through lunch, so let me apologize).

The end result will probaby take as long to explain as it took to handle.

The server was drowning in email being sent tonicholas@seaton.biz. We don't host the website for seaton.biz. Nor do we handle email for seaton.biz. In fact, we have nothing, nada, zip, zilch, nothing what so ever to do with seaton.biz, except for a ton of email trying to be delivered to nicholas@seaton.biz from our server.

Got that?

Read that paragraph again.

Good.

Now, why were we trying to send email to nicholas@seaton.biz? Good question. At the time, the MX record for seaton.biz (which contains the address of the server(s) that handle email for seaton.biz) were resolving to 127.0.0.1.

Now, the IP address 127.0.0.1 is a special IP address—it's the “loopback” address; any network traffic sent to IP address 127.0.0.1 is sent to the box doing the sending—the data “loops back.”

So our server sent the email to nicholas@seaton.biz to IP address 127.0.0.1, which, since that's the “loopback” address, was sent right back to our server. Our server accepted the email because, hey, it has the permission to send email to itself. But since we don't host seaton.biz, or in fact, have anything to do with seaton.biz, the email got requeued up for delivery again.

Which begs the question why we were trying to send email to nicholas@seaton.biz in the first place. In checking the email logs, it seems that one “Nicholas,” who has the email address of nicholas@seaton.biz, sent a bunch of spam to all the sites on our server. And in typical spam fasion, it was sent to a whole bunch of addresses, the majority of which don't exist!

Now, our email server, like every other email server in existance, is configured to send an error notification back to the sender when the email address doesn't exist. So each spam that “Nicholas” sent that didn't get delivered because the destination address didn't exist created a message to nicholas@seaton.biz saying as much.

So that's why we had thousands upon thousands of messages attempting to be delivered to nicholas@seaton.biz, which, because the email server for seaton.biz was set to the “loopback” address, were being delivered right back to our server for yet another attempt at delivery.

Beautiful, huh?

Now, that's not to say that the owners of seaton.biz were the actual spammers—most likely they're not and they're the victim of a “joe job.”

So now the question is: who's doing more damage here? The original spammer “Nicholas?” Or the owners of seaton.biz when they changed their MX records to 127.0.0.1? (not that I can blame them for doing that—it keeps a bunch of useless email from being sent to them and wasting their bandwidth) And what can we do to keep this from happening in the future?

I suppose one way would be to immediately delete any email destined for a site we have nothing to do with, but with an MX record of 127.0.0.1.

I was replying to a thread on Flutterby and about to mention how we here at The Company are this close to just shutting email off and telling customers that they can use Gmail when this weird thought just crossed my mind: Google has an insentive to spam, in order to take over everyone's email!

Now hold on!

Hear me out.

Google started archiving USENET and eventually offered an interface to it. Now, I can tell you that from an ISP point-of-view, USENET sucked. You needed gigs of space, and the server software that supported NNTP was not only a bitch to setup (much like UUCP) but also a bitch to maintain and keep running (it wasn't unusual for the server to collapse under the load of USENET, which meant finding and nuking whole portions of USENET to free up some space) and the users always bitched about how we didn't carry alt.fan.furry.disenchanted.vixen.sex.sex.sex and could we please increase the queue time for alt.sex.pictures.erotica and not delete the group every six hours, even though it could consume 75% of the disk space in six hours?

So Google taking it over meant that ISPs didn't have to anymore (okay, so there are companies that specialize in USENET, like Giganews and PowerUSENET, but free USENET access? It's Google).

And now we get to email.

Google is in a position to take over email much like it's taken over USENET. Take on the hassles (and they have the infrastructure to handle it) and slap on a decent interface (although the Gmail interface is way better than the USENET interface by far), and using the indexing and searching capabilities from the web search engine stuff, and you have a pretty compelling email engine and probably does a killer job on spam (I'm guessing—not using Gmail I can't say one way or the other).

Sure, there are companies now specializing in email (like AuthSMTP and SMTP.com) but for free email access? It's probably Google) but really, Google can make a ton of money on email, if only by selling targetted advertising on email (and hopefully, it's better than it's AdSense program) and until that point, Google can probably make a ton of money by spamming (I'm not saying Google is spamming, but that they have a nice insentive to spam).

I just read your blog post
about seaton.biz. Good lord! What an ingenous way
to XXXX things up! I never thought of
setting an MX to localhost.
That reminds me of the Apple mail
disaster story from the
UNIX haters handbook. The bounceback caused more problems. I
guess in 20 years the reluctance to update E-mail software is still
biting people in the ass. [HTML added
—Editor]

I was thinking about this while I was shopping tonight.

The spammers are still sending spam
to my MX server and about once
an hour or so, my primary email server (which is my main machine here at
Casa New Jersey) gets whacked with a ton of spam all at once. All my
legitimate email? Comes directly to the primary MX server. Most (if not all) of the spam? Goes through
the backup MX server.

Hmmmm …

It's sooooo tempting to set my backup MX record to point to 127.0.0.1.
Soooo tempting.

I think I'll keep my spam for the next 24 hours, and see just how much
comes through my backup MX server,
and then make that change. It'll be interesting to see how much that
effects my spam.

The Court of Appeals of Virginia upheld yesterday what is
believed to be the first conviction in the nation under a state
anti-spamming law that makes it a felony to send unsolicited mass
e-mails.

A North Carolina man was convicted in Loudoun County two years
ago of illegally sending tens of thousands of e-mails to America
Online customers. Prosecutors said Jeremy Jaynes flooded the
servers at the Internet company's headquarters in Loudoun with bulk
e-mail advertisements for computer programs and stock pickers.

Jaynes was sentenced last year to nine years in prison on three
counts of violating the state's anti-spam law and was allowed to
remain free on $1 million bond while his case was appealed. Thomas
M. Wolf, an attorney for Jaynes, said he plans to appeal yesterday's
decision.

Do I really expect to mess up spammers that much by setting my backup MX record to 127.0.0.1? To cause their servers to melt under the load of ever lasting spam circulating through their servers, perpetually delivered back to themselves for anohter round of attempts?

Not really.

First off, the spammers that are sending email to the backup MX server is already using custom (or customized) software to begin with—the SMTP spec states that servers contact the MX servers in priority order (with the highest priority one being considered the primary), which is something the spammers aren't doing.

Second, it's likely that they're using botnets (large collections of compromised machines) to do the actual sending of email, and the chances of the machine in question running an SMTP server are pretty low. So the likelyhood of me causing their servers to melt down are very low.

What I am expecting to see is a drop in the number of spams I receive. And possibly causing a headache or two (hopefully).

I collected spam for 24 hours. 40% of the 275 spams I collected were delivered through my backup MX server, which was somewhat disapointing as I was expecting a larger percentage of spammers to use that techique.

But no matter.

I've gone ahead and changed the backup MX records to point to 127.0.0.1. I'm relunctant to leave it that way for very long (what happens if my primary MX server goes down?) but it will make for an interesting experiment for the next day or so.

… though how on earth you're going to do the company blog is
what I am wondering. I don't think you're the man for that job, not
due to any inadequacy, but due to area of focus. I just don't see
you getting that excited about the sorts of things that should be in
a blog like that.

But in discussing this with Smirk, about 70% of what I write (as he said,
probably taking about 70% of what I mention about The Company) is fine for
The Company Blog, but that I would need to steer clear from certain topics
(like complaining about customers) that really, I have no problem with.
Also, the direction I'm thinking of going with The Company Blog is a
“behind the scenes” type of blog, where I describe what goes on at a web
hosting company, how this whole Intarweb thang works, stuff like that, with
the hope that it'll give people a realistic expectation of what they can
expect from a web hosting company.

I have a prototype up and running but there are still broken links, pages
not finished, and I'm still playing around with the layout and even the name
of the blog. If you are interested in seeing this prototype and giving me
some feedback (and even a potential name) just send me an email and I'll reply with the
link back to The Company Blog.

I found a bug in E-bullion system, which allows you to double
your e-bullion deposit in seconds!

The bug is in the special administration account, all transfers
sent to that account are not withdrawn from your account, but paid
back to you instead.

Please send me $50 E-bullion currency to my account C49355, and
write your email in the memo field. I'll send you the instructions
by email. What I wrote is true, that really works!!!

Frank.

So, Beowulf “Frank” Hamlet (by the way, neat name, but an odd email
address), that's a nice little scam you got going there. I send you $50
bucks from the system you claim to have a hack for, and you'll send me back
instructions.

Hmmm …

Yeah.

Right.

So, let me ponder this for a second. There's a special account at E-bullion that
supposedly adds any amount to transfer to this special account back
to your account. Is this a bug that can be done only one time?
Because if not …

I start with 1¢. Twenty “transfers” later I have $10,485.75. Sweet.
And yes, I can see E-bullion not finding out about this bug at
all.

But tell you what, I got this email from Dr. Luisa Estrada, wife of the
former head of state and President of the Philippines Joseph Ejercito
Estrada, who wants help transferring $18,000,000.00 and is looking for
help.

Project: LOOPBACK doesn't seem to be doing all that much good actually. I have 24 hours of spam since I started (well, a few hours after I started, to make sure the DNS records got propagated, and I have the same amount of spam now that I did prior to the start of this little experiement.

Sigh.

The results make me wonder if someone else tried this and the spammers have already taken this into account.

I could try changing the IP address I use (say, to a private address, or one of the link testing addresses), but I'm not sure if it's actually worth the effort now.

There's a project that might start up at The Company involving lots of
XML and C programming,
so I've been poking around libxml. I'm thinking I might even
want to use this for mod_blog to validate HTML (since libxml
has an HTML parser, and
about a quarter of the time I blow the coding on an entry and have to fix
it).

One problem that crops up is the difficulting in getting errors as
libxml is reading the document into memory. Sure, I can suck
the HTML in with one
call:

htmlDocPtr doc = htmlParseFile(filename,NULL);

(yes, it is that simple). But not seeing how to change the underlying
reporting mechanism (not that I looked all that hard), I decide to switch to
the SAX interface for parsing.
The SAX interface allows you
to register functions to be called during portions of the HTML (or even XML) parsing. Yes, I can grab
the errors as they happen, but now I have to resort to building the document
into memory myself (more or less). But that's okay, since in theory, this
will allow me to not only capture the errors, but filter the HTML as I see fit.

In these callbacks, the name parameter is the name
of the element. The attrs parameter contains the
attributes for the start tag. The even indicies in the array will
be attribute names, the odd indicies are the values, and the final
index will contain a NULL.

It seems that the documentation is a bit misleading—attr
is only valid if there are attributes. Otherwise a
NULL is passed in, which means you have to explicitely check
attr for NULL!

Aaaaah!

Would it have been that difficult for the authors of
libxml to always pass in a valid attr, even if
it's two elements long that both contain NULL? (I suppose most
programmers would check anyway just because, and the bloat
continues)

The second thing. Catching the errors. Yeah. The call backs for
those?

void sax_error(void *data,const char *msg, ... );

The errors (and warnings, and fatal errors) are passed back as a
printf() style message.

So forget about intelligently handling the errors unless you want to
parse the actual error messages.

I went through another 24 hour period of spam and it looks like Project: LOOPBACK SPAM has cut the spam down a bit—only 194 spams from the last 24 hour period. I don't know if this is due to setting the backup MX server to 127.0.0.1 or the natural ebb-and-flow of spam. I'm hoping the former since in the past two weeks or so we've been inundated with spam problems at The Office.

For the past two weeks or so one of our customers (with a dedicated
server) has been having trouble either sending emails or receiving emails
(or both!). The customer in question uses Microsoft Lookout
Outlook (of course—sigh) so Smirk has been looking into the issue and
couldn't for the life of him get Outlook to work.

I then talked with Smirk to get an exact clarification of the problem and
it's a problem with one (1) email account. Just one. Everything
else works fine. So Smirk left it up to me—if I could fix the original
server, fine. Or if I could get the new server working, fine. Just get it
working.

We've moved a few sites to new servers and as always, there are bound to
be a few issues here and there. So it wasn't that unusual to get a ticket
from a customer complaining about some missing content on their site. From
the look of the page, it's the type of content that's dynamically generated,
so it's either a database issue (“but we copied all the databases over!”),
some configuration problem like different file locations (“but the layout
is exactly the same on the new server”) or something easy like that.

The customer in question doesn't have a MySQL database, so I was expecting some
file locations to have changed. So imagine my surprise when I found the
following:

I finally got around to viewingBeyond the Valley of the Dolls (rented from Netflix and it's been sitting on my desk for over a month now) and well … it wasn't a good film, but it wasn't a bad film either. In short, three girls form a rock band and with their manager (who's the boyfriend of the lead singer) they head out to Hollywood to make their fame and fortune, only to fall to sex, drugs and rock-n-roll. The ending comes completely out of left field (but it does explain the “out of left field” opening scene during the credits) and it was surprising in that “I can't believe they broke with the cliché” type way (but all the women in the film were very easy on the eyes—hubba hubba).

thanks, for your attention to this letter. add, I have another
question … Why this problem in [contact form] is presented
frequently? … I expecting about your answer.

Trouble ticket from this afternoon

Fractured English aside (English is not this customer's first language) I
don't know how to answer his question.

Well, I do, because the reason he has constant problems with his
contact page is that it's Frontpage, and that Frontpage sucks as
it's a very fragile program that if you even look at the files
wrong all the Frontpage extentions break and they have to be resintalled
(which is pretty easy—just disable the extentions on the server, delete
the Frontpage specific files, then reinstall the Frontpage extentions).
It's so bad that even Microsoft has finally given up
on it. Not many web hosting companies like Frontpage (because
it's so fragile) and even those that do don't like it that
much.

But how to tell the customer this, without pissing off the customer or
Smirk with my answer?

Yes, I realize it's not April 15th, the traditional date that Uncle Sam holds out his hands least he release the houndsIRS but September 15th.

Most people here in the US have their employers do the withholding (form W-2) and only have to square away once a year. But if you're self employed (or considered self employed, like I am) then you have the privilege of making estimated tax payments four times a year to Uncle Sam.

I've always had an interest in cartooning. As a kid, I wanted to be a cartoonist and I could have probably become one, except I lacked the patience to actually do a daily comic strip (and never mind the fact that newspaper comics are nearly impossible to break into and are dying anyway) but I still have a soft spot for cartooning.

And I'm glad I did. He covers material that I've never seen covered in any of the “making comic” books I have. More than just drawing characters or how to use an ink pen, he goes into page layout, lettering, pacing, story telling, emotions (or rather, a theory of drawing emotions in chracters) and a dozen other topics I've never seen covered before.

Today is The Younger's birthday and it's been a low key type of day. I didn't go all out and make a cake like I did last year (we celebrated his birthday early last year because he was flying out to visit his dad). I did, however, make Sweet-n-Sour Chicken for dinner, which is one of the few meals I make that The Kids like.

I'm turning yet another Cobalt RaQ into a firewall. It requires the use of another PC (with a particular setup—basically, the Cobalt RaQ CD boots off a PC which enables you to to a network boot of the RaQ, and that boot will reformat and install the operating system on the RaQ) which I didn't have on Friday. I have (or rather, Wlofie has) the proper setup at home, but when he did it, the install didn't care for the harddrive.

So now I'm at The Office. We dug out the computer I used to use for this (an older PC in a large case that sounds like a diesel truck that badly needs a tuneup). For the past two hours I've been trying a series of harddrives and none of them seem to work. I try different installation disks (thinking maybe one of them is bad) and still, none of the five harddrives I'm trying are working.

Then Smirk notices that the Cobalt RaQ has two IDE cables. “Sean, humor me,” he said. “Try plugging the drive in the other cable.”

“I don't think it should matter,” I said, not noticing that I said The Word.

“But maybe it does.”

“Maybe,” I said, plugging the drive Smirk wanted to use in the other IDE cable.

The Saltmine Chronicles, the Company Blog, has gone live. So if you're interested in knowing which company I work (and sometimes grouse about) now you can finally confirm your suspicions and know which company I work for.

Oh, I'll still call it The Company here, and I still work for Smirk with P as a fellow cow-orker, but if you're curious …

My plan is to write entries there on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the entries there will be more about how webhosting works, how the Internet works—basically, the behind the scenes of how a webhosting company works (is that enough linkage for you, Smirk? That should boost the Google Page Rank of the sites a bit).

And yes, don't expect to see any grousing over there about the stuff I do. That's what this site is for.

I am chronicling my journey to publication http://gettingpublished2006.blogspot.com/
and want to get an idea of the book review process. I believe
today's authors need to understand how best to navigate the new
publishing paradigm.

As you know, the old filters [agents, publishers, reviewers,
bookstores] are being bypassed via a direct connection of authors to
readers—with reviewers remaining as the major screeners of
gold from dross.

I'd like to know at what stage [.doc, .pdf, paperback, et al.] a
self-publishing author should seek a review—on-line and in
print—and what are the odds of getting a serious review. I
intend to explore the review stage and report on my findings.

The Saltmine
Chronicles, the unofficial official Office blog, is live less than one
day, and I get email addressed from it. My own blog was live for
months before I got an email from someone I didn't know.

Not that I'm complaining, mind you. I just found this amusing, that's
all.

But it's nice to know that John also reads this blog, for which I'm grateful. And I'm
sure that reading about the publishing industry will make for interesting
reading.

I had come to The Office today to attend a networking meeting between us and the other company we share Internet resources with. At the end of the meeting I had asked Smirk if I could go home.

“Yes, but before you do,” he said, “could you look into two tickets?”

Sigh.

Both were networking issues, and both were along the lines of “the Intarweb is kinda broke.”

“Kinda?”

Oh, I also had to stick around to let R, our wireless guy into the Data Center as he did some wireless stuff.

By the time R left, I hadn't gotten anywhere. The one issue with XXXXXXXX was odd—they could get to some sites, but not others. And I was having major difficulty in getting into their managed firewall (we manage it for them). The other issue, with another company, was even worse—the Intarweb just … pauses … from time to time. There was nothing I could see from our side of the network.

So once R left, I decided to leave as well.

Just as I pulled into the driveway at Casa New Jersey, I got a call from R—he needs access to the Data Center.

Sigh.

And just before I pulled out of the driveway, Smirk called back. He was at a customer site trying to troubleshoot a networking issue.

More sighage.

Back to the office. Help R powercycle the wireless device. While there, help Smirk troubleshoot the networking issue at the customer site.

I was able to finally solve the issue with XXXXXXXX. It
was an odd problem though—they could get to some sites, not to others.
Even wierder, I could get to their router from outside, but not their
firewall, even though both were in the same network block. I could ping the
firewall from the router, but the implementation of ssh on
Cisco routers is … well … pathetic so that's not really an
option.

I was able to ping the firewall from an ISP in Boston.

Yup.

Boston (by the way, thanks Eve for not getting rid of the account—it
comes in handy from time to time).

And since I could ping it, I tried to ssh into it.

Success.

A few minutes later, and I'm looking at the routing table of the
firewall.

How odd. Every IP address
between 66.0.0.0 and 66.255.255.255 is being
routed back to XXXXXXXX's firewall. How
did that happen?

I come to find out that they had a power outtage a few days ago, and
that's when their problems started. I check the startup scripts and lo', I
had specified a broadcast address in lieu of a netmask. The command to
configure the interface rejected the value for the netmask and picked a
default mask based upon the IP
address (the address falls into the old class “A” network, which has a
default mask of 255.0.0.0).

Ah.

Well then.

That would certain explain why they were able to get to some sites but
not others. And it would explain why I was unable to get into their
firewall from The Office or Casa New Jersey (as both locations fall into the
66.0.0.0/8 network block).

The Theremin is the first all-electrical instrument made (in 1919) and is the only instrument (as far as I know) that does not require any physical contact to play, just near proximity.

In watching the documentary, I was struck that not only does the Theremin sound similar to a violin, but a melancholy, soulfull violin (with an electronic bent) and as such, it seems perfectly reasonable that it would be invented in Russia. But that may be because most of the music presented was melancholy to begin with (about the only exception being Good Vibrations where it wasn't the only instrument, or even lead instrument).

But the movie was as much about the Theremin as it was about Leo Theremin, the inventor. Both Lenin and Stalin were intrigued by the instrument and it's that intrigue that probably let him tour the States in the late 20s, only to be later kidnapped back to Russia and be forced to work with the KGB while in prison (possibly making electronic spying devices).

Bunny also had several albums of Theremin music, but unfortunately has no way of actually playing the records, they being 78s. Nor do I have a way of playing such records. Pity, because it would be interesting to hear the music.

Now, while I'm willing to suffer the limitations of my blogging software (and lament about them from time to time) I don't think others will. When I thought that I might be the primary author for The Saltmine Chronicles the rather poor state of hypertext editing wasn't much of an issue. But given Smirk's intent to have other people make entries (or comments—I'm still not entirely sure what he wants; heck, I don't think even he knows entirely what he wants) is another matter entirely.

The main problem is maintaining well formed HTML in the face of human editing. When I make a mistake, I can go in and fix the mistake, but that currently involves editing the entry on the server and regenerating the main page (if the entry in question appears on the main page). The workflow for mod_blog doesn't have much support for post-editing of entries (I think—and you would think that as the author of the software in question I would know, but there are some features that I just don't use that often), nor for queuing entries for later editorial aproval (a feature I never really thought of, to tell the truth).

I may have to switch The Saltmine Chronicles over to a more mainstream blogging tool, which is something I'd hate to do, and it's only partially due to having to admit defeat. One feature I haven't seen is the support of new entries via email (which is my preferred method of creating new entries), since my email client supports drafts, it rarely crashes and if it does, I can salvage anything I was editing at the time of the crash. No so if I have to edit in a browser (never mind that I can't stand editing in a browser). And one other small reason I don't like other blogging engines—I have to learn yet another templating system.

But if I have to switch, I have to switch.

And that still doesn't fully fix the editing problems though—it's endemic to blogging and most blogging editors seem to lie between “you write the HTML yourself” and “you never seeHTML so you're stuck with what we give you.” And none of them look like they would work well with mod_blog (for example—they assume too much about tags, which are free form in mod_blog, not limited like in every other blogging system I've seen).

One of our client's customer's site was being used for a phishing
scam. The site itself had nothing to do with the scam, it's just that
someone had uplaoded some pages that looked like a PayPal login
screen. Our client wrote in:

We rec'd a call saying that a phishing scam was using XXXXXXXXXXXXXX (a site on XXXXXX) This is the email they rec”d:

Ticket from our client

And yes, the email was a typical phishing email. I had some exchanges
with the client. It ended thus:

Did you already remove the problem files? If not, what should we
do? And what can we do to prevent this in the future. I'm sure the
client didn't know what was going on.

Response from our client

I didn't remove the files, as it's inaccessible anyway due to the
Apache configuration. If you want, I can delete them.

As for prevention, remind the client not to let out
their account information. Another thing to check is for insecure
CGI scripts
(PHP, etc) that might allow someone to upload such items.

My response

I think it's best to remove the infected files to prevent the
site, or the server, from being blocked or placed on any blacklists
or anything. Thank you.

Client respnose

“Infected files?”

These are not “infected files”—they contain no virus. They don't
propagate on their own. They don't infect other files (I'm also tempted to
question their reading comprehension, as I clearly stated the files were
“inaccessible due to the Apache configuration” but I won't). These files
were placed there by someone.

Does no one truely understand this stuff anymore? Does anyone read
anymore?

Sigh.

Update a few minutes later

Why am I being so harsh?

I think it's because the client that wrote in is a web design and
hosting company (and we do some of the hosting for them). If it was
the end customer, the one who's site was being used, that wrote in,
I would be more forgiving (or rather, I'd roll my eyes, fix the
problem, and go on). But for a company that does web
design? That also hosts some of their sites? Them, I
would expect a bit more from.

In the end, I rolled my eyes, fixed the problem, and then went on
to make a post about it.

I just finished a long article aimed at our customers into partially troubleshooting why their site is down (most times it's because of network issues between them and us) and it took entirely too much time to write.

Then again, I wasted a bunch of time making that XXXX table at the end. And I still can't figure out why I can't get the right margin larger than it is.

One of the things that really pisses me off is, when trying to troubleshoot one problem, I'm forced to sidetrack and solve a totally unrelated problem that's preventing me from troubleshooting the first problem.

This came up today at The Office. We received a bunch of equipment today, a Cisco router, some Cobalt RaQs. I also needed to get a managed power device configured for the Data Center Core Room. All these devices can be configured via a serial port. This is something I've done plenty of times before.

Only I can't talk to the Cisco router.

So I try one of the Cobalt RaQs.

Can't talk to it.

Try another Cobalt RaQ.

Can't talk to it either.

Try the managed power strip.

Again, can't communicate with it.

Okay, maybe the cable is bad. That happens.

Attempt to find a replacement cable.

Now, the cable I have is female-female. I have a male-male adaptor that I use, depending upon what I'm connecting to.

I can't find another female-female cable.

Male-male cables, yes.

Male-female cables, yes.

But not a duplicate of the one I have.

So my initial problem (testing the new equipment) is compounded by another problem—either the cable is bad, or the serial port is bad.

It is times like these that get me upset.

(Turns out it's the serial port on my workstation, which could either be a loose connection inside, or the serial port itself is completely burned out.)

Basically, it's running a restricted version of SMTP over port 587 and from what I can
find, it's only been in the last two years or so has it been widely
implemented, although this is the first I've heard of it.

You may not use any computerized or automatic
mechanism, including without limitation, any web scraper,
spider or robot, to access, extract or download any Content
from our Service, and as an express condition of your use
of our Service, you warrant to us that you will not use the Service
for any unlawful purpose or purpose prohibited by this Agreement. If
you violate any part of these Terms of Use, your permission to use
Content automatically terminates and you must immediately destroy
all Content in your possession or under your control.

We require all our users, including Registered Users and
Subscribers, to respect all copyrights, service marks, trademarks
and other intellectual property rights of ours and others. On
notice, we will act expeditiously to remove Content that infringes
the copyright rights of others and will use all reasonable
commercial efforts to deactivate and disable access to our Service
of anyone who uses our Service to repeatedly infringe the
intellectual property rights of others and if you wish to send us
such a notice, please use the following procedures: If you
believe our Service contains elements that infringe your copyright
or the copyright of anyone else, please click on the following link
to go directly to our Notice and Procedure for Making Claims of
Copyright Infringement and follow the procedures that are
described. Of course, if you believe any Content violates
any of our Terms of Use, please send us a message about it at
mobi.us@dada.net. We cannot guarantee we will respond to your
message and we reserve the right to take or refrain from taking any
or all steps available to us once we receive any such message.

If you have downloaded Content, it is your responsibility
not to destroy or damage such Content because we are not responsible
if any Content you download is lost, destroyed or damaged.
We have no obligation to restore your Content if that happens or to
maintain records for the purpose of our or your doing so and that is
solely your responsibility. Once Content is transferred to your
portable device as permitted, you may not copy, distribute, transmit
or transfer it from that portable device to any other portable
device or media. You are also prohibited from sharing downloads,
enabling or allowing the sharing of downloads, with anyone else. Our
Community Requirements contain additional rules, requirements and
guidelines concerning your obligations with respect to Content, our
Communities and the Service.

Now I'm beginning to think that English isn't their first language (then
again, lawyers are not known to speak any known human language to begin
with).

The rest of the document is your standard “we don't own your content but
we can exploit it, resell it, use it, abuse it, or anything else we can
think of without remuneration on our part” and “we don't really guarantee
anything on this site will work at all” but the parts I quoted—quite
clueless about this stuff.

Sheesh.

I'm also having a difficult time finding out what the site actually
does or why anyone would sign up—the site itself is very unwieldy
and horribly confusing.

Then again, given their Terms of Use, it's no wonder.

Then there's this beauty from their requirements page:

You acknowledge and agree that Postings from you, from
your wireless or mobile device or from your User ID are your
responsibility and therefore, you, not us or any other
party are entirely responsible for the consequences of your
Postings. We assume no responsibility for Postings, their deletion
or any failure to store, transmit, receive, make available, display,
forward or deliver Postings in any manner, timely or otherwise, even
if due to our Service or Website, so don't rely on us, our Website
or our Services for any Posting. With respect to each and every one
of your Postings on our Website or in connection with our Services,
you agree, represent and warrant to us that:

(a) you are placing your Posting in the public domain
without reserving any rights or further control over your Posting or
its use. You specifically, unconditionally and irrevocably
authorize us, at our option, to use your Posting, in whole or in
part, throughout the universe, in perpetuity in or on any and all
media, now known or hereafter devised, discovered or developed,
whether alone or together, in combination or as part of other
information, content and/or material of any kind or nature, without
compensation, notice or any accounting or accountability to you or
anyone else;

(b) if your Posting incorporates a name, logo, brand,
service or trademark, voice, likeness, image or other distinctive
identification or reference to any person, firm or enterprise, you
have the right to place that Posting in the public domain and grant
us the right to use that Posting as described in our Terms of Use,
including these Community Requirements;

…

(f) neither we, nor any other party, shall be required
to pay or incur any sums or compensate you or any person,
firm or enterprise as a result of or in connection with our
use or exploitation of any Posting.

I actually enjoy reading these Terms of Services, privacy statements and
disclaimers because inevitably, they sound like they're written by people
who have no clue how the Internet or even computers work. They even state
all the evil things they'll be doing, like installing spyware, selling your
information, and restrict what you can do on your own computer.

One of the services we offer is Internet connectivity and we have a few
clients in this very building, and one of said building customers is
freaking out because their firewall (which is managed by a third party) is
blocking (and reporting as much) traffic from our network and of
course such activity is causing problems on their network. I doubt
it's our network causing the problem since:

They are an exclusive Microsoft Windows shop.

They have about 100 Microsoft Windows desktop computers in their
offices across two floors.

Their network is flat. As in, one logical segment.

Microsoft Windows, espcially if you have file sharing
enabled (aka NetBIOS), tends to be very chatty on a network segment
(lots of broadcast packets looking for other machines with which it
can talk to).

It is my understanding that the majority of users on their
network use a web-based application.

This whole mess is behind a single firewall, which is connected
to our network.

My diagnosis is that periodically, their firewall gets swampped with
broadcast packets (even if the machines send out a broadcast at random
intervals, given enough machines and time, you'll get a brief broadcast
storm) or with a lot of people making requests with the web-based
application they use (a similiar situation).

I was in their office yesterday with the network analyzer, and plugging it into a port on
their switch revealed that about 33% of the traffic is broadcast, with peaks
up to 80%. On a flat network, each station (and this includes the firewall)
receive all the broadcasts.

This is not good.

But, seeing how they've even outsourced their network to a third company
(and not the one that makes the firewall) fingers are being pointed
everywhere, so that's why I'm in The Office at midnight on a Friday
(technically, Saturday) trying to segment off their traffic.

You see, our network is rather flat at the moment. Not as flat
as our customers, nor with the number of machines, but still, they're seeing
some of our traffic (not a lot mind you—I've seen their logs) but
enough to freak them out.

Now, we have managed switches, and it's easy enough to create a VLAN to
isolate traffic (I've done so to a limited degree) but while it's easy on an
individual switch, it's not something I've done between network
switches, although in theory I know how it's done.

In theory you program the ports on either side of the connection
that it's a tagged port (or “trunked”—I've seen both terminology used)
and that Ethernet packets being sent down this cable are to be tagged with
the appropriate VLAN they belong to.

So I spent much of Friday afternoon double checking my network maps and
making sure I knew which ports of which switches had which network
traffic, and planning on which VLANs go where.

I figured if I'm going to do this for one customer, I might as well go
ahead and do it for everything, since the next chance I get to do this might
be quite a while.

Physically, they're plugged into a switch, which is then plugged into a
switch/router. If they were plugged directly into the switch/router then I
would just isolate that port and be done with it, but since there's another
swith between them and us, I have to set up the trunking port (or tagged
port, or whatever the terminology is).

Three hours later, and it's not working. I can't get the switch and the
switch/router to communicate when using VLANs.

Turn off the VLAN
sharing and they talk fine.

And I think it has something to do with the terminology problems I'm
having. The switch talks about tagged and untagged ports. The
switch/router talks about having trunks. I'm not entirely convinced they're
the same thing.

So for now, things are status quo.

Update later today

I talked to Smirk, and he suggested I just go ahead and plug that
customer directly into the switch/router and isolate their port, and
do that on Wednesday when I'm in The Office.

Obligatory Miscellaneous

You have my permission to link freely to any entry here. Go
ahead, I won't bite. I promise.

The dates are the permanent links to that day's entries (or
entry, if there is only one entry). The titles are the permanent
links to that entry only. The format for the links are
simple: Start with the base link for this site: http://boston.conman.org/, then add the date you are
interested in, say 2000/08/01,
so that would make the final URL:

You may also note subtle shading of the links and that's
intentional: the “closer” the link is (relative to the
page) the “brighter” it appears. It's an experiment in
using color shading to denote the distance a link is from here. If
you don't notice it, don't worry; it's not all that
important.

It is assumed that every brand name, slogan, corporate name,
symbol, design element, et cetera mentioned in these pages is a
protected and/or trademarked entity, the sole property of its
owner(s), and acknowledgement of this status is implied.